Politics shouldn't skew judicial selection

Every so often, someone points out that Washington has a screwy way of picking judges. This time, the someone is Sandra Day O’Connor.

At Seattle University Law School on Monday, the former U.S. Supreme Court justice argued that Washington’s judicial races leave the state open to political favoritism on the bench. This may not have been as much of a concern as it was a couple decades back. But as O’Connor noted, there’s been “a flood of money coming into our courtrooms” in recent years.

The money is from campaign contributors who have a deep interest in electing their friends to supreme courts and other appeals courts. In Washington, the flood has come from many directions: property rights advocates, labor unions, trial lawyers and others. It’s a safe bet that anyone giving big money to a judicial campaign isn’t doing it out of pure devotion to blind justice.

Elsewhere, things have gotten worse. In West Virginia, amazingly, one business executive spent $3 million to elect a state supreme court judge who then provided the one-vote margin needed to overturn a $50 million jury verdict against the donor’s company. It took the U.S. Supreme Court to undo that travesty.

The problem isn’t limited to high-profile supreme court races. Elections for trial courts too often produce judges who just don’t belong on the bench. Witness the all-too-credible prostitution charge against Pierce County Superior Court Judge Michael Hecht, whose trial is scheduled to begin next month.

Judicial elections do have plenty of supporters. Their best argument is that elections force judges to be accountable to the public they serve. But O’Connor and many other reform advocates favor a hybrid in which judges are first appointed by the governor after going through a professional screening process. The appointees later face the voters in “retention” elections.

Retention elections don’t pit one candidate against another; citizens simply decide whether they want the sitting judge to stay on the job or step down. It provides a means of unseating judges who are performing poorly or else way out of step with the electorate. Twenty or so states use some variation of this system, which is known as the Missouri plan.

But in Washington right now, any talk of change seems more or less moot.

The Washington Constitution mandates elections open to multiple candidates. To shift to something like the Missouri plan, Washingtonians would have to be persuaded to give up their right to elect their judges. It’s hard to see that happening without an appallingly obvious failure of the system – corruption in the state supreme court, for example.

Even without an overhaul, Washington’s judicial selection process could work a lot better. For starters, bar associations could consistently provide public ratings of judges and would-be judges, giving citizens a better idea of how much respect candidates command in the legal world.

At a minimum, voters should be able to learn how lawyers regard the men and women who decide their cases.